Crusade in Carville

In the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at Carville, La., the blind editor-patient okayed the last story as it was read to him. Compositor-patients put the paper to bed. Printer-patients ran off 8,000 copies. Then the whole press run was baked, to sterilize it. Last week the tenth anniversary edition of the Star went out to subscribers in 48 states and 30 foreign countries. The Star's single-minded editorial objective: to knock down misconceptions about Hansen's disease, as the 400 Carville patients call their illness--in popular parlance, leprosy.

"There isn't any scientific necessity for sterilizing the copies," says Editor Stanley Stein, 52, a onetime Texas pharmacist who has been a Carville patient for 20 years. "We do it only as a gesture of respect to the unconvinced." Stein and the Star make no other concessions to popular prejudice. The fight to ban the word "leper" has been officially won: U.S. health officers are under orders not to use it. Stein and the Star are still battling against the word "leprosy" itself.

Tireless and imaginative. Stein has won the backing of the American Legion (he is a World War I veteran) and of such stage friends as Tallulah Bankhead, a longtime subscriber and general booster. Thanks largely to Stein and the Star, patients at Carville have established their right to vote (a technicality of state law once disfranchised them); their precinct is usually the first in the state to report. They have won the right to have visitors, a month's leave a year when their disease is quiescent. Stein will not rest until state and federal laws recognize that, except among children, Hansen's is one of the least catching of all diseases (no staff member at Carville has ever contracted it), so that most patients could be treated in or near their homes.

Recent medical advances with sulfone drugs have benefited Patient Stein but created personnel problems for Editor Stein. Staff members are discharged from Carville when the disease is arrested. Besides six Texans, the Star's staff now includes a Cuban, a Mexican, a Virgin Islander, a Dutch Guianan, a Hawaiian, a Samoan and a Filipino.

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